On The Vulnerability of Recurrent Neural Networks to Membership Inference Attacks

Yunhao Yang, Parham Gohari, ufuk topcu

Keywords: Privacy, Recurrent Neural Networks, Membership Inference Attack, Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: We study the privacy implications of deploying recurrent neural networks in machine learning. We consider membership inference attacks (MIAs) in which an attacker aims to infer whether a given data record has been used in the training of a learning agent. Using existing MIAs that target feed-forward neural networks, we empirically demonstrate that the attack accuracy wanes for data records used earlier in the training history. Alternatively, recurrent networks are specifically designed to better remember their past experience; hence, they are likely to be more vulnerable to MIAs than their feed-forward counterparts. We develop a pair of MIA layouts for two primary applications of recurrent networks, namely, deep reinforcement learning and sequence-to-sequence tasks. We use the first attack to provide empirical evidence that recurrent networks are indeed more vulnerable to MIAs than feed-forward networks with the same performance level. We use the second attack to showcase the differences between the effects of overtraining recurrent and feed-forward networks on the accuracy of their respective MIAs. Finally, we deploy a differential privacy mechanism to resolve the privacy vulnerability that the MIAs exploit. For both attack layouts, the privacy mechanism degrades the attack accuracy from above 80\% to 50\%, which is equal to guessing the data membership uniformly at random, while trading off less than 10\% utility.

One-sentence Summary: We study the privacy implications of deploying recurrent neural networks in machine learning tasks.